Annie Dillard World Quotations

I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.

The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.

What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?

The world knew you before you knew the world.

It is the fixed that horrifies us, the fixed that assails us with the tremendous force of mindlessness. The fixed is a Mason jar,and we can't beat it open. ...The fixed is a world without fire--dead flint, dead tinder, and nowhere a spark. It is motion without direction, force without power, the aimless procession of caterpillars round the rim of a vase, and I hate it because at any moment I myself might step to that charmed and glistening thread.

The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.

What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.

I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.

Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.

I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains

Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.

It should surprise no one that the life of the writer - such as it is - is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.

Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.

Having chosen this foolishness, I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid?

It would seem that emotions are the curse, not death-emotions that appear to have developed upon a few freaks as a special curse from Malevolence. All right then. It is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave the library then, go back to the creek lobotomized, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first.